Challenge by Tampere3 (SCIL): Tampere3 Smart Campus Challenge

What Is SCIL About?

Smart Campus Innovation Lab (SCIL) is a Tampere3-wide internal innovation ecosystem – a living lab – and an open-source development community. In SCIL, students from various fields, IT professionals and university professionals collaboratively carry out development projects that benefit the higher education consortium on a wide scale. At the very core of the innovation operations are digitalization, digitization, and open data in a broad sense. SCIL contributes to the ‘smart university’ development of the entire higher education consortium and will improve its overall capability to succeed in the digital era.

What Needs to Be Improved?

As building of Tampere3 progresses, we foresee an increasing need for students to move between the campuses. One of the main benefits of Tampere3 for students is the increased opportunity of learning experiences and access to world-class expertise and teaching. To realize this value students will need to study on various campuses around the town, and are therefore expected to commute between the different locations.

In most cases students commute between the campuses using public transportation, but also via other means, such as walking, by bike or by car. This setting challenges the optimization and planning of one ́s timely resources, as the locations of the studies may vary remarkably within a given time frame, even within one day. In addition, due to the size and complexity of the campuses, the exact locations of the lectures, laboratories and other learning facilities may be challenging to navigate to, without proper guidance.

We are interested in helping Tampere3 students to (1) plan their personalized study schedules effectively, (2) help them share transportation resources between campuses, and (3) help them find facilities within campuses by using a mobile application.

What Is the Challenge?

Briefly, the Challenge is to develop an application that can ease the life of Tampere3 students. The main features in prioritized order are:

1. A feature to plan individual study schedules, which takes into consideration the locations of the studies and the means of transportation as well as the estimated time required to commute between campuses.

a. The application should be able to search the study schedules of all three institutions and combine them in a useful way to the schedules of Tampere public transportation.b. The scheduling system should be enabled via browser and mobile interfaces and the actual information visualization at least via mobile UI.

2. An “UBER-like” non-commercial feature to publish and share transportation with one’s own vehicle, and to publish requests for transportation.

a. The users should be motivated to use this feature, through gamified elements.

3. A functional demonstration of how in-campus location data could be implemented and utilized within the application.

Tampere3 institutions will provide the required university specific open data for the application development, accessible through a dedicated API management platform (please see the links underneath Challenge description). However, there may be some limitations to the availability of study schedule data, and in such a case the developers must find ways to simulate the data. Currently, there are also limitations to in-campus location data, however, pilot environments have been established in the campus of University of Tampere. The developed application should be an open source project, to be maintained in GitHub of Tampere3, provided by SCIL. The language of the application is English, and the main operating platforms are web browser, Android and iOS. Basic personalization features should also be provided. More detailed specifications and other relevant information will be provided in a meeting with the representatives of SCIL.

Experience and skills needed in solving this Challenge:

o Service designo Working with open data sources (APIs)o Development of mobile applicationso Designing flexible user interfaces and attractive user experienceo Merging of several completely different data sources to a product producing value

If you have any questions concerning the contents of this Challenge, please contact scil@tampere3.fi.